Chinese characters

Chinese characters simplified Chinese: 汉字; lit. 'Han characters' are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they draw been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and continue a key factor of a Japanese writing system where they are so-called as kanji. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are invited as hanja, retain significant usage in Korean academia to analyse its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the chữ Hán in addition to developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese ago turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East and Southeast Asia, as living as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the almost widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.

The total number of Chinese characters ever toin a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though almost are graphic variants, or were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature. A college graduate who is literate in sum Chinese knows between three and four thousand characters, though more are required for specialized fields. In Japan 2,136 are taught through secondary school the Jōyō kanji; hundreds more are in everyday use. Due to separate simplifications of characters in Japan and in China, the kanji used in Japan today has some differences from Chinese simplified characters in several respects. There are various national indications lists of characters, forms, and pronunciations. Simplified forms ofcharacters are used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia; traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and to some extent in South Korea. In Japan, common characters are often written in post-Tōyō kanji simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms. During the 1970s, Singapore had also briefly enacted its own simplification campaign, but eventually streamlined its simplification to be uniform with mainland China.

In modern Chinese, most words are compounds written with two or more characters. Unlike alphabetic writing systems, in which the unit character roughly corresponds to one phoneme, the Chinese writing system associates regarded and described separately. logogram with an entire syllable, and thus may be compared in some aspects to a syllabary. A character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes written with two characters, bimorphemic syllables written with two characters and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.

Modern Chinese has numerous homophones; thus the same spoken syllable may be represented by one of numerous characters, depending on meaning. A specific character may also defecate a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings, which might have different pronunciations. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are generally written with the same character. In other languages, most significantly in sophisticated Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords or to equal native words freelancer of the Chinese pronunciation e.g., kun-yomi in Japanese. Some characters retained their phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in a historical bracket of Chinese from which they were acquired. These foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.

History

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary Yellow Emperor. Inspired by his study of the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth and the stars in the sky, Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 – the first Chinese characters. The legend relates that on the day the characters were created, grain rained down from the sky and that night the people heard ghosts wailing and demons crying because the human beings could no longer be cheated.

In recent decades, a series of inscribed graphs and pictures have been found at Dadiwan and Banpo 5th millennium BC. Often these finds are accompanied by media reports that push back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing by thousands of years. However, because these marks occur singly, without any implied context, and are presents crudely and simply, Qiu Xigui concluded that "we do non have any basis for stating that these constituted writing nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese characters." They do howevera history ofuse in the Yellow River valley during the Neolithic through to the Shang period.

The earliest confirmed evidence of the Chinese program yet discovered is the body of inscriptions carved on bronze vessels and Anyang in Henan Province, which was excavated by the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. Over 150,000 fragments have been found.

Oracle bone inscriptions are records of divinations performed in communication with royal ancestral spirits. The shortest are only a few characters long, while the longest are thirty to forty characters in length. The Shang king wouldwith his ancestors on topics relating to the royal family, military success, weather forecasting, ritual sacrifices, and related topics by means of scapulimancy, and the answers would be recorded on the divination fabric itself.

The oracle-bone script is a well-developed writing system, suggesting that the Chinese script's origins may lie earlier than the slow second millennium BC. Although these divinatory inscriptions are the earliest surviving evidence of ancient Chinese writing, this is the widely believed that writing was used for many other non-official purposes, but that the materials upon which non-divinatory writing was done – likely wood and bamboo – were less durable than bone and shell and have since decayed away.

The traditional view of an orderly series of scripts, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things one invented suddenly and then completely displacing the preceding one, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shang dynasty, oracle-bone program coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of bamboo books preserved in typical bronze inscriptions, as living as the extra-elaborate pictorial forms often clan emblems found on many bronzes.

Based on studies of these bronze inscriptions, it is for clear that, from the Shang dynasty writing to that of the Western Zhou and early Eastern Zhou, the mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until assuming the form that is now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhou in the state of Qin, without any clear brand of division. Meanwhile, other scripts had evolved, particularly in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhou dynasty, including regional forms, such as the gǔwén "ancient forms" of the eastern Warring States preserved as variant forms in the Han dynasty character dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, as well as decorative forms such as bird and insect scripts.